Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Summary
Air pollution dynamics has a nature of complexity. Firstly, it is influenced by the
characteristics of the emission source, especially the elevation where a pollutant is discharged.
Then the meteorological conditions are discussed since they are determinant for the dispersal
of the air pollutant. Some important meteorological factors are described in detail in this
chapter. The air pollutant can be removed by dry and wet deposition processes in the
atmosphere, and this has an important impact on the fate of the pollutant. Although a dynamic
process can be described using a physical theory, it is not always possible to solve such
mathematical equations. A general Eulerian and Lagrangian approach is introduced in this
regard and the Gaussian plume equation is extensively illustrated, as it is the most commonly
used one. A simple description is then given for constructing the necessary components for a
comprehensive air quality model, and a brief concept of an air pollution episode
complemented with meteorological control is also presented. Finally, the authors give their
comments on future developments in air pollution dynamics and modeling.
1. Introduction
Personal experience tells humans that air pollution constantly changes with meteorological
conditions. Air laden with visible pollution can be transformed to clear, blue skies within
hours by a sudden change in the weather, such as the passage of a weather front. It is obvious,
therefore, that air pollution is a dynamic problem.
In practice, how air pollutants are transported to a specific location is always important. Most
industrial effluents are discharged vertically into the air through a stack or duct. After leaving
the discharge point, the contaminated gas stream (the plume) expands and gradually mixes
with the ambient air. Horizontal air flow tends to bend the discharge plume downwind. At
some point, the effluent plume levels off. While the effluent plume is rising, bending, and
moving horizontally, the gaseous effluents are being diluted by the surrounding ambient air.
As the contaminated gases are diluted by ever larger volumes of ambient air, they eventually
reach the ground through dispersion.
The mere presence of sources of emissions does not necessarily constitute air pollution. Every
air pollution problem has three requisites:
1. There must be an emission of the pollutant or its precursor into the free atmosphere.
2. The emitted pollutant must be confined to a restricted volume of air.
3. The polluted air must interfere with the physical, mental, or social well being of people.
Very often urban air pollution problems are aggravated by meteorological and topographical
factors that concentrate pollutants in the city and inhibit quick dispersion and dilution
processes. As complex as the phenomenon may be, it can be easily depicted by means of a
simplified systems analysis diagram. Figure 1 represents such a system approach. Air
pollution dynamics refers to the various processes operating during a pollutants lifetime in
the atmosphere, from the emission source to a receptor.
Figure 1. Air pollution system
2. Source characteristics
An important factor affecting ground level concentrations is the rise of the plume above the
discharge point, and its subsequent transport. The higher the plume rises initially, the greater
distance there is for diluting the contaminated gases as they expand and mix downward to the
ground. The plume rise is determined by both the upward inertia of the discharge gas stream
and by its buoyancy. The vertical inertia is related to the exit gas velocity and mass, whilst the
plumes buoyancy is related to the exit gas density relative to the surrounding air density.
Increasing the exit velocity or the exit gas temperature will generally increase the plume rise,
resulting in lower ground level concentrations.
The physical stack height plus the plume rise, is called the effective stack height. When the
pollutant plume rises significantly before leveling out, the calculation of ground level plume
concentrations should use the effective stack height instead of physical stack height. The
effective stack height can be estimated using a number of equations such as the Holland
equation and the Davidson-Bryant equation. No allowance is made in these equations for
conditions of atmospheric stability. Modifications are needed since the rise of the plume
above the stack under unstable conditions is about 10% higher than calculated and under
stable conditions about 10% lower. Also, the effect of water droplets cools the plume and
causes it to lose buoyancy.
Given a specific discharge height and a specific set of plume dilution conditions, the ground
level concentration is proportional to the amount of contaminant materials discharged from
the stack outlet for a specific period of time. Thus, when all other conditions are constant, an
increase in the pollutant discharge rate will cause a proportional increase in the ground level
concentrations. This is the basic principle of reducing pollutant emissions in order to achieve
air quality improvement.
(1)
5. Atmospheric Diffusion
5.1. Atmospheric Diffusion Theories
Study of the atmospheric aspects of air pollution is aimed at being able to describe
mathematically the spatial and temporal distribution of contaminants released into the
atmosphere. It is common to refer to the behavior of gases and particles in turbulent flow as
turbulent diffusion or atmospheric diffusion, although the processes responsible for the
observed spreading or dispersion in turbulence are not the same as those acting in ordinary
molecular diffusion. A more precise term would be atmospheric dispersion, but to conform to
common terminology atmospheric diffusion is used here. Because of the inherently random
character of atmospheric motions, one can never predict with certainty the distribution of
concentration of marked particles emitted from a source. Although the basic equations
describing turbulent diffusion are available, atmospheric flow and turbulence are so
complicated that there is no single mathematical model which can be used as a practical
means of computing atmospheric concentrations over all ranges of conditions. There are two
basic ways to describe turbulent diffusion the Eulerian approach and the
Lagrangian approach. The mathematical relationships based on the two approaches are
dissimilar, but the ultimate pollutant concentrations can be related. Each of the two models is
a valid description of turbulent diffusion; the choice of which approach to adopt in a given
situation will be dependent on the specific features of the problem.
The behavior of pollutant in the Eulerian approach is described relative to a fixed
coordinate system. This type of description is the common way of treating heat and mass
transfer phenomena. It intends to formulate the concentration statistics in term of the
statistical properties of the Eulerian fluid velocities, which were measured at fixed points in
the fluid. A formulation of this type is very useful not only because the Eulerian statistics are
directly measurable (as derived from continuous time recordings of the wind velocities by a
fixed network of anemometers), but also because the mathematical expressions are directly
applicable to situations in which chemical reactions are an important component. But a big
drawback is that the Eulerian approaches lead to a serious mathematical obstacle known as
the closure problem, for which no generally valid solution has yet been obtained.
The second approach is the Lagrangian method in which concentration changes are described
relative to a mass of moving air. It attempts to describe the concentration statistics by means
of the statistical properties of the displacements of groups of pollutants released in the air. The
mathematics of this approach is more tractable than that of the Eulerian approach, and no
closure problem is encountered. But the applicability of the resulting equations is limited
because of the difficulty of accurately determining the required pollutant statistics. Moreover,
if nonlinear atmospheric chemical reactions are involved, the equations are not directly
applicable.
In summary, it can be seen that both approaches have certain inherent difficulties, making it
impossible to achieve an exact solution for the mean concentration of pollutants in turbulent
flow. For more practical purposes, several approximate theories have been used for
computation of mean concentrations of pollutants in turbulence. The K-theory is most
commonly used to solve atmospheric diffusion equations, and the statistical theory is of
significant practical value, based on the behavior statistics of individual particles in a stable,
homogeneous turbulence field.
5.2. Gaussian Plume Equation
If the determination of the concentration of reactive pollutants is to be obtained (involving the
physics of the turbulent flow and mixing processes and the chemical interaction of reacting
gaseous species), a numerical calculation approach must be applied. Such numerical analysis
is very time-consuming even if a modern high-performance workstation is available.
Solutions of this type for just a single set of meteorological conditions require the expenditure
of a large computational effort. Even further, effort and cost are needed for the prediction of
long-term averages of compound concentration. For most practical situations, the Gaussian
plume model is a simple method to apply, and can give useful results provided its limitations
are properly observed.
Under certain idealized conditions, the mean concentration of a species emitted from a point
source has approximately a Gaussian distribution. This serves as the basis for a large class of
simplified atmospheric dispersion formulas in common use, although they are most valid only
in the case of a stationary, homogeneous turbulence field. Gaussian-based formulas are widely
used and sufficiently accurate for most practical applications. The basis of these formulas is
the widely known Gaussian plume equation, an expression for the mean concentration of a
species emitted from a continuous, elevated point source. The Gaussian plume equation is
based on the approximation that the concentration downwind of a point source in the
atmospheric boundary layer follows Gaussian distribution but with unequal dispersion
coefficients in the horizontal ( ) and vertical ( )
directions. Thus the downwind concentration at a location of x, y, and z reads:
(2)
Where Qp is the emission intensity of the pollution source (in grams per second), and u is
the average wind speed. The Gaussian plume method has been widely used as the
computation basis in a number of computer programs, which are available for selected special
applications.
5.3. Atmospheric Diffusion Equation
Although the Gaussian equations have been widely used for air pollution dispersion
calculations, the inability to account changes in wind speed with altitude and nonlinear
chemical reactions limits the situations in which they may be used. The atmospheric diffusion
equation provides a more general approach to atmospheric diffusion calculations than the
Gaussian models, based on the K-theory. It can be proved that the Gaussian model is a special
case of the diffusion equation when the wind speed is uniform and the eddy diffusivities are
constant. The atmospheric diffusion equation in the absence of chemical reaction is
(3)
The key issue in the use of Eq.(3) is to choose the functional forms of the wind speeds, u,
v, and w, and the eddy diffusivities, Kx, Ky, and Kz, for the particular case of interest. In view of
the hypothetical nature of the closure relationship and the other approximations involved, this
equation must be considered as an approximate, semi-empirical expression. The validity of
the atmospheric dispersion equation is to be judged by its ability to achieve predictions that
agree either with observations under a variety of conditions, or with solutions to a series of
problems obtained by another method of known veracity. The atmospheric diffusion equation
is to be solved numerically.
8. Remarks
Air pollution dynamics and modeling have undergone a period of intensive studies in the last
30 to 40 years. A lot of methodologies have been developed and applied in many actual
situations and resulted in an abundance of practical experience. While theory problems have
almost been resolved up to now except for those inherent to meteorology and atmospheric
turbulence, practical difficulties still exist in various applications of these theories. There are a
number of air quality models available worldwide, based either on a numerical approach
when chemical reactions are involved or on Gaussian equations if non-active species is
treated, but they all have their own shortcomings. In most cases the emission and dispersion
of particulates are not dealt with, and knowledge of atmospheric aerosol behavior and its
interactions with gaseous compounds are not fully established. The complex configurations of
urban surface cannot be sufficiently accounted for in numerical urban air pollution models at
resolutions high enough for the needs of human exposure study. When statistical approaches
are adopted to develop micro-scale dispersion models, they are generally not of a universal
nature. The inadequacies of current air quality models are apparent when their predictions are
compared with observations. Due to the turbulent and constantly changing nature of the urban
atmosphere, satisfactory accuracy is difficult to achieve, and will require a significant effort in
the future.
Related Chapters
Click Here To View The Related Chapters
Glossary
Dry adiabatic : the condition of no heat exchanging with outside air
: the height to which the warm air rises and mixes with the cooler air until
Mixing depth
it meets its equal in temperature
Temperature : the variation of temperature with elevation
profile
Bibliography
Elsom D.M. (1992). Atmospheric Pollution-A Global Problem. Blackwell, USA. [The book presents an overview
of worldwide regulations on motor vehicle emissions].
Hamilton R.S. and Harrison R.M. (1991). Highway pollution, 339pp. Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam,
Netherlands. [The book presents a series of articles on the dispersion, environmental impacts, and control
strategies of motor vehicle emission].
Heinsohn R. J. and Kabel R.L. (1999). Sources and Control of Air Pollution. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle river,
New Jersey, USA. [This discusses major air pollutant source characteristics].
Knap A.H. (1988). The Long-Range Atmospheric Transport of Natural and Contaminant Substances. Kluwer
Acadamic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands. [The book described the characteristics of long distance air
pollution transport].
Lindberg S.E., Page A L. and Norton S.A. (1990). Acidic Precipitation, 222pp. Springer-Verlag Newyork Inc.,
USA. [This describes dry and wet deposition dynamics of acid species].
Scorer R.S. (1990). Meteorology of Air Pollution. Ellis Horwood, Chichester, England. [This covers the major
meteorological conditions that are important for air pollution dispersion].
Seinfeld J.H. and Pandis S.N. (1998). Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Wiley, New York, USA. [This book
gives a systematic description of atmospheric diffusion physics and dynamics].
Biographical Sketches
Mr. Lixin Fu is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China. He was born in May 1966 in Hunan Province of China. He received his Ph.D. degree
from Tsinghua University in 1998.
Mr. Yang Chen is a research student working for a master degree in the same department. He was born in June
1974 in Zhejiang Province in China.